A Corpus-based Study On The Markedness Of English Antonyms

In the language learning, there exist various relative phenomena and opposite relationships in the objective world. The antonym is the phenomenon which has been contradictory in the objective things that reflected in the vocabulary. While the opposite notion is essential attribute and law of the objective world that reflected in human brain. Therefore, opposite category, as a linguistic category, has more directly realistic foundation on the basis of perception in human brain. The markedness of language shows a relationship of asymmetric antagonism, so many linguists and scholars have done a series of researches on the markedness of opposite structure. However, the research on the markedness of English antonyms with the corpus is not enough. This paper studies on the frequency of antonyms with marked prefixes, not only has a certain academic significance, but also has an important value in semantics and semiotics.In this paper, the data are collected from COCA corpus and developed by Professor Mark Davies who is from Brigham Young University of USA. COCA is the acronym of Corpus of Contemporary American English. This corpus has contained 425 million words covered various materials published in 1990 to 2011 for 22 years, and it is the largest balanced corpora in the world. Moreover, this corpus is free for researchers and learners online. Spoken English, novels, popular magazines, newspapers and academic journals are five types of corpus in the United States; the five corpora are evenly distributed and have the basic uniform distribution in the five-year period of time as well.This paper compares 11 pairs of antonyms with marked prefixes, collected from 56 pairs of antonyms in Steven Jones' new book---"Antonym: A Corpus-based Perspective" (2002). These linguistic data are from the entire contents in the newspaper of "Independent" from October 1st, 1988 to December 31st, 1996, which has a capacity of 280 million words. The emphasis of this paper is to survey the antonyms with marked prefixes and unmarked prefixes and analyze the co-occurrence along with the frequency. It can search words within a span of 9 (9 words to the left and 9 words to the right of the node word) in COCA. The ratio of 11 pairs of antonyms with marked prefixes in 56 pairs of antonyms is 19.6%, accounting for about one fifth, showing that the frequency of antonyms with marked prefixes is high in people's daily lives. In addition, in Chinese, for example, "甭,孬,歪,奀 (the pronunciation is the same as'en')" these words, the marked prefix is"不", the meaning is"no", therefore, in the vocabulary, human beings who have the background with common perception in the world have the same ideas in economy principle.With the help of COCA, this paper analyzed the antonyms with marked prefixes, it can not only help learners expand their vocabulary, but also increase their interests in learning English and enhance the understanding of language as well. On one hand, it can solve issues of language materials'authenticity and diversification, or meet the practical needs of foreign language teaching, but on the other hand, it can also promote development of foreign learners to learn English independently. This paper investigates antonyms with marked prefixes of English by using real data from COCA. The frequency that most commonly used should be mastered by beginner to intermediate learners. We put words in order from highest to lowest according to word frequency. Thus the results not only improve the effectiveness of English vocabulary teaching but also enrich the contents of teaching, which has greatly contributed to change in vocabulary teaching methods. And this makes the students prefer to learn and master these high-frequency words, while word frequency from COCA data can be used to solve fundamental problems in vocabulary teaching.The complete structural framework of this paper is as follows:The first chapter explains the research problems and objects of analysis and describes the importance of research.Chapter two is literature review section; it takes about the research results study on markedness of English antonyms by major schools of linguistic scholars. And the final is a brief description and evaluation.Chapter three, we talk about theories in this article --- semiotics, conceptual activation, markedness theory, co-occurrence, economy principle along with the psychological analysis of human cognition, and a detailed description of the theory.The fourth chapter is the particular process of research and analysis.The fifth chapter is conclusion of this paper. We solve the research questions, summarize the results and find the limitations as well as future prospects of this study.